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I have always been fascinated by the fact that we people leave our imprint on everything we do. When I watch a film, I inevitably wonder what percentage of the director's personality is ingrained in his characters. How much of the killer, gangster, superhero or casanova is in him? 

At the same time, these characters have served us, the spectators, to project parts of ourselves that seem to be asleep inside us and in this way, for a few moments, we feel like something we are not but would like to be. Something very similar happens to me when I look at the portraits in this exhibition, when I see myself reflected in the brave and warrior women of Fátima de Juan, in the friendly and stained characters of Edu Carrillo, in the monsters of Mira Makai, as well as in the surrealistic buttocks with eyes of Dasha Shishkin or in the enigmatic faceless characters of Jordi Ribes. What is there in me from all of them? 

How much is of the artist in them? Standing in front of a portrait is like standing in front of the mirror of humanity, and it means discovering things about ourselves through the other. In the Artual gallery space, these characters coexist with a series of more sober and monochromatic pieces, which far from being understood as objects in themselves, represent a very different way of portraying the essence of man. 

Losing oneself in the endless brushstrokes of blue that run across the surface of Mattew Feyld's circular paintings is the most vivid portrayal of the act of painting itself. 

Ben Edmunds' Color Field paintings, on the other hand, neatly sum up the romantic aspirations of freedom and nature through the aesthetics of technical sports equipment. To conclude and returning to the idea of the mirror, I find myself in front of the work "Waving Goodbye (Absent)” by Ian Waelder, where an enigmatic face seems to escape between the grayish tones of the linen, blurring the boundaries between portrait and monochrome. 

In the same way, in front of the bathroom mirror and after having washed my face, I disappear and the reflecting surface that a few moments ago mirrored my face now shows the white tiled wall.

Enrique Suasi